The cloudflare message happens when the server can't be reached. This can be for many reasons, but generally it's when it can't be reached at all (as opposed to just being slow).
Other than today, I can think of a time in January where I was updating Lemmy to a new version, that was for about 10 mins.
There might be other brief periods where the host has issues with the server or other issues on the rack.
We also have a bit of downtime coming up next week when the hardware gets upgraded, but I'll do a post with more info once I know more.
Lemmy is far, far more stable than it was when the instance launched 18 months back, but it's still not perfect (or even good). It's not uncommon for me to find the UI hanging while trying to load posts, but it normally only lasts a few seconds.
I've seen other admins complaining recently and some things to try offered so I have it on my lists to make some changes and see if I see an improvement.
Nah, it happens for me too. It doesn't seem to happen (as much) using alternate frontends or apps, so I think it's the actual front end that is freezing (on the server side) rather than the lemmy backend.
I have some tweaks to try and some instances are running multiple UI containers which I might try as well, just need a chance to test it all first before doing it on the live one, and there's also a minor lemmy version to upgrade to as well. So many jobs 😆
Thanks for the support! One thing wouldn't be so bad but I have another dozen I run on a home server, and I've been making some big changes so trying to tidy up that first (especially so I can free up the space for cloning Lemmy's 300GB+ of data to do a test run). I'd hoping that work will be complete soon so I can create the lemmy test instance and try out some changes plus test the lemmy upgrade.